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Administrators, who said they weren’t prepared to talk about the report last week, are now refuting the information following a closer look.

FAU issued a statement about the study, which follows below.

School officials note that Nissen is a Senator with FIU’s United Faculty of Florida.

Another big point they make is that the study falsely classified some faculty as administrators, making it seem as though administrators are growing at a faster rate than teachers. Other employees who don’t teach, but also aren’t “administrators” were also counted as administrators in the report, FAU said.

The report claims there were 788 professors and 1,178 administrators.

I asked for clarification on those numbers from FAU and earlier this week was told that the number of professors who are responsible for regular classroom teaching duties was 804. That’s not a lot higher than the 788 used in the study.

The confusion comes because when faculty become department chairs, their primary responsibility is no longer regular, daily classroom teaching, but in many school reports they are still classified as faculty.

Also, other high-level administrators who do not teach, are listed as faculty in school and state records.

Bottom line, it’s not an easy task trying to figure out exactly how many people are actually in the classroom teaching everyday.

Just look at these three reports from FAU, which list different faculty numbers for the same year.

Last week the Palm Beach Post and the Sun Sentinel ran articles on a report issued by the Center for Labor Research and Studies at Florida International University and funded by the FAU Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida. The report focused on expenditures at Florida Atlantic University. As indicated at that time, we did not have sufficient time to review the report and fully respond, although a cursory review found some numbers to be inaccurate. Below is a report that was sent to the members of the FAU Board of Trustees this afternoon highlighting just a few of the inaccuracies in this report.

We have been asked to provide some feedback regarding the faculty union-funded report “How the Money is Spent,” which was sent out by the UFF last week. The report was developed by Florida International University’s Research Institute on Social Economic Policy. Analysis by our staff has found the following irregularities that call into question the objectivity and veracity of the report. The examples cited below are just a few of the report’s many errors and misrepresentations.

Randy Goin, Jr.
Chief of Staff & BOT Liaison
Office of the President

Analysis of “How the Money is Spent”

– The study fails to disclose any information on the affiliations or conflicts of the authors, one of whom holds an executive appointment with both the statewide United Faculty of Florida union and the Florida International University chapter of the UFF.

– The authors fail to observe the commonly accepted standards for categorizing faculty and administrators, which were developed jointly by the U.S. Department of Education and the Bureau of Labor Statistics and apply to all colleges and universities. This has led them to lump a large number of professional support staff with administrative personnel in an apparent attempt to pad their numbers. As a result of this flawed approach, it appears that a large number of computer programmers, K-12 teachers, academic advisors, librarians and student affairs personnel have been erroneously categorized in the report as “administrators,” which, in turn, artificially inflates the number of “administrators” allegedly hired by the University during the timeframe of the report. We were unable to reconcile or recreate their data.

– Standardized data collected by the federal government through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) reveal that among the 11 state universities in Florida, FAU has the second highest percentage of faculty in its workforce (34.06% in 2007, just behind Florida Gulf Coast University at 34.10). The same survey shows that FAU has the fourth lowest percentage of non-faculty Executive/Administrative/Managerial personnel among the 11 institutions.

– Although the authors claimed to have taken student data on FTEs from the IEA Fact Book and Quick Facts, we are unable to reconcile their numbers with ours. Annual student FTE numbers in Table 1 of the report are off by several thousand, and figures for the 2008-09 academic year have not yet been finalized.

– Other irregularities appear in Table 5 of the report, which indicates that FAU had four Provosts in 2001-02 when there was obviously only one. The table also indicates that the number of Associate Provosts increased from three to five, but fails to note that this resulted from the reclassification of two individuals from the rank of Assistant Provost to Associate Provost. The two Assistant Provost positions were left vacant, which meant there was no net increase in employees. This is just one example among many of very careless use of data that produced inaccurate, misleading conclusions.

– The UFF analysis equates union membership and bargaining unit inclusion with “faculty” status and non-inclusion in the bargaining unit with “administrative” status. In 2005 approximately 50 faculty department chairs were identified by the Public Employee Relations Commission (PERC) as being “out-of-unit” for purposes of collective bargaining. The study’s authors shifted those faculty members from “faculty” status in their data to “administrative” and subsequently used that shift as the basis for assertions about an increase in administration numbers at FAU. Once again, this simply represents a reclassification of existing employees — in this case, employees whose job titles and functions had not even changed — and not a net increase in personnel.

– The study fails to account for the addition of two new large academic/research units at FAU, the Charles E. Schmidt College of Biomedical Science and the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. Both of these entities have relatively large complements of professional staff who directly support faculty and students. The study miscasts these individuals as “administrators,” a designation that is contrary to standard federal workforce definitions and falsely inflates that category of employment.

– These and other fundamental deficiencies make this a deeply flawed study. The report’s statistical inaccuracies render its conclusions about salary inequities highly suspect if not meaningless. The authors’ repeated misuse and misinterpretation of data reveal an intention to make the facts fit the conclusion rather than the other way around. No one who is familiar with the manner in which such a study should be conducted would consider this one credible.

FAU continues to place the highest value on its truly outstanding faculty; to accept this flawed study would be disrespectful to these dedicated professionals. A convoluted “research” report is not needed in order to recognize that the focus of this university continues to be on providing an excellent education to our students through our fine faculty.